2bb
PARTISAN REVIEW
meant by it is nothing like a theoretically worked-out doctrine, as
that of Bakunin or Kropotkin; he was hardly able to distinguish be–
tween anarchism and socialism. The one emphatic distinction he did
make was between believing and unbelieving rebels; and if he was
an opponent of the socialists it was, on the conscious level at any
rate, because of their ,atheism, which he struggled to suppress in him–
self, and the totalitarian potential he discerned in their designs. In–
evitably his religious anarchism brings to mind the anarchism of
Tolstoy, and in this respect it is instructive to compare the two novel–
ists. Dostoevsky's anarchism is fully as Utopian as that of Tolstoy
but with these important differences: it is latent rather than manifest
in his work and it is mystical rather than rational in conception; its
political aims are ill-defined and ambiguous; intrinsically it is more
the expression of an apocalyptic mood than of a radical will to revo–
lution as a practical enterprise. The notion of a "free theocracy" ex–
pounded by Ivan is a contradiction in terms--a system of government
by priests is scarcely the medium in which freedom might be expected
to flourish. But
if
it is a contradiction, it is exactly of the type, holding
in balance his conflicting impulses toward rebellion and submission,
to which Dostoevsky was always irresistibly drawn.
In the late 1870s, the period of the composition of
The Brothers
Karamazov,
his exasperation grew as he watched the continuing at–
traction of Russian youth to subversive doctrines. He felt the need
to provide some kind of alternative to those godless doctrines, and
one surmises that that was the motive for his advancing, even if
tentatively, the idea of the regeneration of society through the rise
of a "free theocracy." This idea, however, is so vaguely related to the
real forces at work in Russian society, so Utopian in essence, as to
suggest its makeshift character as a hastily mounted countermove,
from the position of religious radicalism, to the atheistical radicalism
of his opponents among the intellectuals. On a deeper level, and with–
out abandoning in any way his faith in the Russian Christ, he yet
reacted to the signs of disintegration all around him by becoming
more and more skeptical of man's capacity for salvation and the
meaningfulness of his history. Thus he came to fear that the weak–
ness of men would eventually bring on a successful attempt to organ–
ize their happiness by compulsion. This theme was not new to him.
He had dealt with
it
before, in
Notes from Underground
and in
The
Possessed.
